Chapter One: The Dungeon Is Born
The Second Shiso, Summoning Super Mint
[Core Room]
"We have a problem. The second library's computer runs on 'BTRON,' so it can't connect to this Core Room. It seems I summoned it from an entirely different parallel world."
"I'm guessing there's no book on how to wire together computers from two different worlds."
"Worse than that. We can't even determine 'which' world a book came from, so reference books are no reference at all."
"A reference book like that is only good for fuel."
"And we've even got books that say things like this."
After the World War, Germany was dismantled, and its easternmost regions, Prussia, Posen, and Silesia, became the "Prussian Confederation."
The area along the Polish border had long held a large Jewish population, and after the failure of Zionism the Jews concentrated there further still. The former German states were each handed a troublesome colony by the League of Nations, "so that they could never wage war again," but the Prussian Confederation's colony was likewise a barren wasteland, and even deporting the Jews there proved impossible.
Because these people came to lead the field of computer science through the mid-to-late twentieth century, the control architecture of computing machines is written in Yiddish.
"I can manage English or French, but a computer that runs on Yiddish is beyond me."
"Then how about summoning a Shiso…? One who's good with computers?"
"We do need a network programmer, certainly. And someone for the electronics work, too, fabricating connector terminals whose specs physically differ from one another."
The Shiso summoned for that purpose was an androgynous figure, on the shorter side. Its short hair held the bright-green metallic luster of a structural color, and its eyes were a vivid, bright green to match.
"Race, Mint. I have no name."
"If the race is Mint, then the name's Mint too. Good enough!"
The Dungeon Core announced,
Master has set a monster as Named. The individual name of the monster 'Mint' is set to 'Mint.' Because the species name has been used as the individual name, no further Mints can be summoned.
"Now that the super-skilled, super-duper-skilled, super-peppermint Lady Mint has arrived, I'll turn this dungeon into a mint field!"
What had been summoned was not a hacker, but peppermint.
"A pleasure. I'm Marie, this dungeon's personal secretary. Our two tier-groups were summoned from different parallel worlds, and the computers aren't compat… oh, that's right. Mint, if you really are super-peppermint, why not just build us the whole library catalog while you're at it?"
"That's all? And here I thought I was going to be made to build some inter-dungeon communication system run on avian carriers. Seeing as there's no communication network, apparently."
"We can't summon birds. There don't seem to be any magazines that come with a live carrier pigeon as an appendix, either."
Marie answered in earnest, but moving animals through the distribution networks for books, magazines, and newspapers is difficult. There might be the odd exception, but since a book's summoning cost is fixed by its print run, it would come at quite a premium.
"It's an intranet built out of machines with mismatched specs, when you get down to it. You call it a 'library catalog,' but it's not even an OPAC. It's offline."
"And it won't be open to patrons, either. The literacy rate in this world is extremely low."
Whether that's true of the whole world or just this neighborhood, we'll set aside. Still, even in Umeda, the Mercantile City, the "Tōyoko Kids" down on the fifth basement floor of the fifth tier-group "Shibuya" are very nearly illiterate. What's that? The literacy rate up in the first tier-group "Umeda" is dubious too?
"Just an AC, then. Alternating current, and yet it doesn't interchange a thing. How's that for irony?"
Say what they would, Mint went on to integrate the two libraries' systems and complete the library catalog. There was, however, one serious flaw to Mint…
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